Thursday, June 25, 2015

Blog #4 Jigsawing

How did it feel to jigsaw Lane and Rief? What would you change or keep when doing this with your own students? Share thoughts on the value and the drawback to jigsawing (because there are both). :-)
Post by Sunday, if you can and respond by Tuesday.

15 comments:

  1. I really enjoyed Jigsawing Lane and Rief. I learned a lot from everyone's chapters and appreciated hearing them verbalized, since that's how I learn the best. My only suggestion is that we would not have shared them all at one time because it was a bit information overload. Other than that, I really enjoyed learning from everyone and following along in the chapter. I think it is extremely efficient and beneficial, I would be interested in seeing this done in the classroom and watch the best way to do this with students. I have done this once with a chapter from a textbook and I felt like it went well and that students appreciated not having to read the whole thing to the point where they worked harder on their section they were given. It was a cool effect. It also gave them good practice public speaking when they had to articulate and be the teachers of what they just learned.

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    1. I agree with your information overload comment. Perhaps if we were to set Barri's hard rock timer and summarize what we felt were important parts that would help alleviate the overload. We could also do a five minute section each day for somebody to share their chapter.

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  2. I agree about spreading out the chapters. I did zone out after a while, but I wanted to soak up all I could. If I were to do this on my own, I would probably have two students share per day, though I do understand the time constraints of the Writing Project.

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  3. I was glad we jigsawed the Lane and Rief chapters and that I avoided being a "Riefer." Personally, I take more away from Lane due to his practical advice, and there were two chapters I was more excited about in his book. The jigsaw strategy accommodated that desire. Along with spreading out the chapters throughout the week more, I would have students provide some sort of handout with their presentation if time allowed. I wanted to do this for my chapters, but ran out of time, so I a hypocrite in this matter. I jigsawed a nonfiction text this past year with my seventh graders. I put them in groups of three or four and they presented their findings while audience members took notes on what they learned. It went well, though one does have to outline the structure much more when working with adolescents than college students. I found myself, when we jigsawed Lane and Rief, noting which chapters I "had to" go back and read on my own. I wondered if and how many of my future students would think the same if I used this strategy again. Finally, I really liked the idea Dr. Bumgarner (AKA Barri) shared of jigsawing a novel. That strategy has potential.

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    1. I enjoyed the Lane text as well and found his practical insights and detailed activities to be both relevant and interesting. I thought your insight into whether or not students will actually go back and reread nonassigned chapters to be interesting. All too often it seems that we get caught up in the rush of life that we tend to skim or skip over extra work for learning. I had one student that said she totally loved my book recommendations I gave during the school year but that she would not be able to read them because she was too busy. While jigsawing is great because we can get through a bulk of material quickly, we tend to lose depth and students feel too busy to want to willingly return to material already covered. The age old question I suppose is how do we stimulate student curiosity?

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  4. I enjoyed jigsawing the texts as it allowed us more time to devote to writing while still getting the gist of what the readings are about. The primary positive aspect everyone gains from jigsawing is that we can move through a lot of material pretty quickly. The downside is that rather than going in depth with each chapter, everybody gets the abbreviated version and what one person thinks is not important in their reading another may have found the information extraordinary. If I were to do the activity again, I would want to set a timer for each section so that it forces to us to summarize the readings in our own words and rely lesson rereading whole sections of the text that takes up more time.

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    1. I agree with you that jigsawing allows us to move through material quickly. While it would be ideal to read a whole novel/text with students, sometimes there is simply not enough time. But, the jigsaw activity allowed us to get through a significant amount of material in a meaningful and organized way.

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  5. I really enjoyed jigsawing Lane and Rief. I plan on reading all chapters in both books, but it's difficult to balance that along with my other coursework. The jigsaw activity introduced me to enough material from both books until I do read them, though. I thought the activity flowed really well and I loved hearing what others had to say since we're all teaching different grades and subjects, so it gave me great ideas that I never thought of. I would set this up very similarly in my classroom with students. Granted, the reading material would be different. But, I liked that we each got to pick the chapters based on our interests and preset it however we wanted. I would probably give students a list of ways to present the text to the class, like Christy made a list of all the essential details from her chapter. As Jim mentioned, I would also set a timer, depending on how long I wanted to spend on the activity. It's important that students meet the time requirement to show they know the material, but it's also important that they do not go over to give each student a chance to share.

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    1. I also liked that we got to pick our chapters that we wanted to read and share. That gave us a choice in our learning, and helped us get through the chapters more easily, which is how the students would see it, I'm sure.

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  6. I think doing the jigsaw for the reading was really helpful. Having too much to read can be stressful and when it feels like more of a chore than a luxury, the information loses its value. I think by doing the jigsaw and being allowed to pick specific chapters to focus on made us all read more in-depth and also made us think deeply because we were required to teach the main points to the rest of the class. The only drawback, in my opinion, of doing the jigsaw method is loss of interest. It gets a little long for each person to talk so much about a chapter, so it may be more beneficial to just do one or two per class to keep interest. I always use jigsaw in my classrooms! My student feedback makes me want to keep using jigsaw because the students both love to work together, but they also admitted that having to teach the material forced them to know the content better, which is great. I now know which chapters I want to take the time to look at more as well as the ones I might put off until needed. Overall, glad we did it!

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    1. Ali, I agree when you say it begins to be less interesting when everyone shares their chapter. I would just focus on two chapters each class period that way students don't lose interest.

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  7. Ali, you make a good point about the affect knowing they will have to teach the material to some degree has on students. As Mr. Grupe would say, "It raises the level of concern." Students generally seem more concerned about being embarrassed in front of their friends than they are of receiving a poor grade, so jigsawing taps into that motivational force.

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  8. I liked jigsawing because it allowed us to only have to read one chapter, rather than the whole book. We were able to share ideas and have a discussion as a class. I was really able to process a lot of information at one time, and it took much less time to do it this way than it would have to read the entire book of Lane and Rief.

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    1. I agree Haylee! Jigsawing definitely takes less time since you have less reading to do. I also like that we get to share ideas for the chapter and have more of a discussion.

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  9. I like jigsawing because it makes the reading more meaningful. For other classes that don't use jigsawing for chapters, I just skim the readings and only read key information. When I jigsaw the chapter, I read the chapter entirely and pay more attention while I'm reading it. You have to become an expert of this chapter to share with your peers so you read more intently.
    For my students, I probably would put them into groups to share their chapters instead of doing it whole group. Each group would have 3-4 students who would be assigned different chapters. I also think it's beneficial to have the students type out an outline to share with their peers. That way the other students have a resource for that chapter they didn't read.

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